Weekly Recap

This week wasn't as busy as last week, thankfully. Silas and Eli had karate on Monday and Wednesday, and Mercie had gymnastics on Thursday. We have to drive 12 miles to "town" to get to gymnastics, so we went ahead and made a library trip and Wal*Mart run while we were there. Karate is right next door to us at the church gym, which is so nice!

Titus {preschool} has been asking to do schoolwork "like Silas". Silas has been using the Preschool Mom's R.E.A.D. curriculum, and I remembered I had bought and downloaded the "Bible ABC" curriculum some time ago and never used it with Silas. I printed out the first week, and Titus learned about the letter A {which he already knew} and lowercase a, which he didn't know. I'm glad we started back with "Aa", because it will give him a week or two of "easy" worksheets before he starts learning letters he doesn't know yet.

I love how the Bible lessons are intertwined with the letter of the week. We learned that A is for Adam and Eve, read about them in our Bible, and talked about God  being the Creator. He learned what the word "image" means, and can recite his Bible verse. He enjoyed the copy-work {which was tracing} and loved all of the coloring {you can see where he wanted me to help out!}.

You can see how fun all of these worksheets are! He had to find the "A"s and "a"s and circle them, color and cut out A and a for his "Alphabet Quilt", use dot markers to dot the A, along with an A maze, count and graph the pictures that start with "a", trace and write his A's and a's, and played the Spinner Winner game. He was really excited about this, because Silas has a Spinner Winner game each week with his words. We used a pencil and a paper clip to make a spinner. He would spin the paper clip, and then trace the A or the a. The letter to make it to the top first, wins! {For the record, the capital A won.}

In math, he played with pattern blocks, and we reviewed the numbers 1 and 2.

Silas {kindergarten} is using the R.E.A.D. curriculum, and has completed three weeks so far. It teaches word families and sight words, which has been working really well for him. So far, he knows the -at, -am, and -ab word families, and is working of the sight words "the", "and", "my" and "is".

He has a Spinner Winner game each week, and instead of tracing the words, he wanted to color the boxes. He also loves the word search each week {top left} and has gotten quite good at them. He writes his words almost every day, so his handwriting has been improving a lot.

 

He has sight word practice pages each week, a comic-book style reader to read with his word families and sight words, and plenty of practice pages! He hasn't complained once about the worksheets because they are all fun! He loves using the dot markers to decorate his word family letters.

 

They were so proud that they both got to make a crown today!

 

In math, Silas learned his numbers 11-19. We used a Place Value Village and beans to show the tens and ones place value. He used flashcards and put them in order from 11-19. He can recognize each number, which is truly amazing. He had plenty of practice writing them, too. Math Lessons for a Living Education includes lots of number copywork!

 

 

Mercie{3rd grade} has been reading "Charlotte's Web" and completing a simple book unit that I'm creating for her. I'm reading each chapter, writing 2 or 3 vocabulary words for her to define, and writing a few questions to test her comprehension and get her thinking more deeply. She also had a "label the spider's body parts" page to complete.

 

She had ten spelling words this week, with a word search to complete and a word search she had to create for me to complete. She also learned about plural nouns, regular and irregular.

 

In math, she reviewed column addition, reading and writing temperatures and clocks, and addition and subtraction facts.

 

That's it for the elementary kiddos!

 

Mikaela {8th grade} learned about exponents, scientific notation and how to use exponents on a calculator this week in math. Eli {6th grade} learned about prime numbers and factors, including how to make a factor tree.

 

They both completed a unit in America the Beautiful and a Lesson in Learning Language Arts Through Literature. In our writing workshop, they learned about the author's tone and diction. We read about the water cycle in Ecology, and they had a chapter test today. Mikaela has been reading "Adam and His Kin", and Eli is reading some Big Nate books from the library. They both worked on Rosetta Stone Spanish this week.

 

How was your week?